Edith frowned at Urgg from her place on their screen. “You weren’t the only one who guessed.”
“Probably not,” Urgg replied with a shrug. “I would guess a fair amount of people have suspected something going on between Monqilcolnen and Wyn.”
Seth, who’d spurned the cookies, took a sip of his drink and commented, “I didn’t guess, not really. I mean, I had a passing thought when Edith mentioned it, but not really. We did talkabout it a few times, but I never actually thought Wyn liked Monty.”
I laid a hand on his wrist, then coiled my tail about him to offer comfort in case he was upset. Seth, while perfectly lovely, wasn’t the best at guessing romantic attraction apparently, though I thought I’d done a fair job of hiding it.
Not a good enough job from Urgg’s expression. They were exceedingly smug, having guessed about my attraction to Monqilcolnen. In fact, they seemed to have known of it before I did. Perhaps my sudden liking of him wasn’tthatsudden. I’d always been looking at him, avoiding him, I thought, but maybe I’d been fighting what was always there, and I just didn’t know it.
“What’s the issue?” Edith asked, drawing me out of my thoughts. “It’s my understanding that people don’t gather like this at a late hour unless there’s a problem.”
Seth glanced at me, his eyebrows coming together. “Does Monty not like you?”
It was on the tip of my tongue to say yes, but I swallowed it. “I don’t know.”
“He does,” Urgg said with complete certainty.
“How do you know?” I asked.
They couldn’t know… unless he’d confided in them. Monqilcolnen was close with Talvax. Perhaps Urgg had overheard something? Though it seemed unlikely Urgg would share something private. Despite their loudness and humor, Urgg wasn’t one to spill secrets that weren’t theirs to share. However, Monqilcolnen had said enough to his father for him to suspect, so maybe it was simply how he spoke of me to others.
The mere thought of him talking about me to others made my pulse pound in my ears.
“He tells your stories,” Urgg replied, drawing me out of my thoughts. “He is binding the two of you together.”
I frowned. That was Barusian culture, not Drakcon. “I doubt that holds true.”
“So he might like you?” Seth asked with a smile. “I think the two of you would be great together.”
Once again his lack of knowledge of our culture was showing. Seth might have been here for a few cycles, but he wasn’t a drakcol.
Urgg made a low noise. “I don’t know about that.”
“What do you mean?” Seth asked. “If they both like each other, then they can get together.”
I nudged the cookie on my plate. Any appetite I had was gone.
“Yes and no,” Urgg continued. “There’s no law against it, but they are very different stations. Monqilcolnen’s parents probably expect him to make a great match. Not that they can stop him. It’s hard to explain, Seth.”
His father wasn’t against me and Monqilcolnen, but I didn’t mention that. I simply said, “We do not match. If we got together, people would whisper about us, namely me. I would be seen as a class jumper. Some might even go as far as to say I tricked Monqilcolnen into caring for me.”
Seth bobbed his head, hands digging into his pockets. “We have something similar on my planet, though it’s usually only applied to women. Gold digger.”
I blinked. The translation was exact, someone who digs for gold. That seemed like a profession, not an issue.
“Married or rather mated for money,” he amended.
“Yes, that’s similar.” Though it seemed to be unfair that only women could earn this title, I'd learned that sexism plagued Seth’s planet. Sexism, and colorism, had never been something that sprouted in Drakcon culture, but classism and soulism ran rampant.
“Still,” Seth continued, “if you wanted, the two of you could be together?”
“We could,” I conceded, and I wanted to be with Monqilcolnen, which was so new and foreign to me. Something about him called to me, and as we spent more time together, I desired him more. “But I don’t know if he cares for me, regardless of what others say.”
“Do you want us to find out?” Urgg asked, chomping into a cookie and spraying crumbs everywhere. “Is that why you wanted to see us?”
“Not exactly.”
“We could find out,” Seth said, head bobbing enthusiastically.
